Central office or headend locations typically include a plurality of mechanical chassis mounted in a rack for housing electronics such as optical transmitters, receivers, amplifiers, couplers and switches. However, the number of chassis in a rack is limited and, therefore, the number of slots in a chassis for receiving and retaining electronics in limited. Moreover, because of the increased desire for and consumption of video in the forms of HDTV and VOD, along with the ongoing requirement to maintain high data rates to the end user, operators need to make plant upgrades in order to maintain competitive and to satisfy their end customers. Operators are migrating towards a 1:1 transmitter-to-node ratio to reduce node sizes and enable more narrowcast bandwidth.
Therefore, what is needed is a means to increase the number of electronics modules such as transmitters without using additional rack space and without having to reconfigure the existing chassis or power supply.